Getting Started in Building Websites For Profit

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Getting Started in Building Websites For Profit Building websites can be a great way to earn extra income if you know how to do a few crucial things. It isn't very hard to learn if you are willing to work at it, but it does require a certain amount of discipline and hard work. Unfortunately, there are many shady internet marketers who will happily try to convince you that you make a fortune online with little or no effort, if only you buy their whiz-bang system for several hundred (or even several thousand) dollars. Too many people get sucked in by these scam artists. The reality is that everything you need to know to get started can be boiled down into a few pages. My purpose here is to present to new people the basic information they need to get started, with a minimum of fluff and a maximal does of realistic expectations. How Do You Make Money With Websites? So let's start with the big picture. How exactly does anyone make money by making a website? I'll answer this by first talking about how many people THINK other people make money with a website, which is actually not how most internet marketers and home business people make money online. Many people who think of making money online think of websites like Google or YouTube or Twitter or MySpace. These were created by 20-something whizkids who whipped up the websites and huge chunks of complicated software to support them. Then they got a whole bunch of investment money from Silicon valley venture capitalist firms, built up a huge user base, advertised everywhere they could (spending millions of dollars of investors' money) and then (like YouTube) sold the business for $1.6 billion dollars. This is definitely NOT how most online businesses make money. On a smaller scale, there are some "brick and mortar" store owners who make money online by simply creating a website to help sell products and services they already offer offline. This can certainly big a good thing to do - in fact it is hard to imagine any business where this isn't absolutely essential to do these days - but again, this money making approach is only for people who already have a business to promote. The simple truth is this: The way most home business people, specifically those starting out without any particular product or service, make money online is to create a number of websites and earn money through some form of advertising. What exactly does this mean? Specifically this means that most people create websites that have either PPC ads (like Adsense) or affiliate ads or both on their websites. So the process of building a website business consists of the following steps: Choose a topic of interest (a "niche") around which to build a website Write some "content" for your website - basically this is a set of articles about specific topics related to your niche Create your website with this content. You can use a website builder program, or use a template you find online, or pay a web designer on Elance.com to make a template for you Join several of the advertising networks discussed below. Place their ads onto your website Buy a domain name and web hosting, and launch your website on that domain name. Get some backlinks to that website and do some website promotion Do these same steps with more websites. Keep repeating until your online income is what you hoped it would be Let's look at each step in the process: Picking a Niche When you choose a niche around which to create a website, there are several factors to consider: Do you think this niche is of interest to enough people in the world that you can get enough people to your website? Even if there is enough interest, will people interested in this niche be interested in advertisements for products? Will your viewers ever be interested in opurchasing products you recommend? Does this niche already have too many competing websites online? Do you know anything about the subject matter? If not, is it something you can learn quickly? Do you have enough interest in the subject matter to be willing to devote some time into researching and writing about this topic? In short, you want to find a niche that has an interested target audience, and audience of people who are willing to view ads and spend money if presented with a good product. You want a niche that isn't already saturated with competing websites. But you also want something that you find interesting enough yourself so that you are willing to work at building up your website. For example, many people may think payday loans or car insurance are good niches because lots of people are willing to pay for products in these areas. But if you aren't interested in payday loans or insurance, you may get to the point where you absolutely hate putting any more work into the website. If this is the case, it will be very difficult for you to succeed. So choose a niche that has a good balance of all these factors. So what are typical niches? The possibilities are endless. A typical website business person might start out by creating say 10 different websites in 10 different niches like: Controlling anxiety Fixing a motorcycle Getting a credit card Training your dog Learning Spanish Controlling acne Chicken recipes Finding MP3 files online Buying stuff on EBAY etc. There is really an unlimited number of niches around which anyone can build a website after doing a bit of research into the topic. Writing Content The best way to get started in creating a website is to first figure out what information you want your website to have on it. Don't worry about the visual layout of the website quite yet. Instead, focus on the content, which is what people will come back for anyway. Put yourself in the position of someone who doesn't know much about the subject but needs to know more. What are the major topics someone would want to know about this niche? Once you have identified the topics, just write a few hundred words about each topic. When you're done, you have the basis for your new website. I know that many people hate writing because it can be hard work creating an article from scratch. If it were easy, everyone would do it all day long and we'd all be rich. Yes it takes some work. But the good news is that it gets easier and easier the more you do it. Unfortunately you really do need to do it. Yes, you can hire someone to do some of it for you, but only you know exactly what it is you want to say on the topic, so it is really important for you to be the one to at least get started in writing the content. Later on, you can hire someone to edit the content or even to write additional content. But you won't be satisfied with your website unless you write the initial parts of it yourself. If you really want to hire someone to help you out, a great place to go is Elance.com. Elance is an online freelancing community where you can find people to help you with writing, website building, and a wide variety of other topics. Typically you can hire someone to write articles for you at about $10-$20 per article, or have someone build you a website for a few hundred dollars. Since these activities do cost money (even though they are much cheaper on Elance than they would be if you tried to hire someone locally), it really is a good idea to learn how to do as much as possible on your own. Create Your Website Once you have your content ready, you will need to create your website. You have many choices here. You can scour the web for free website templates, or even spent a little money to purchase a template. You can use a website builder program like Dreamweaver to create your website. If you know a good deal about HTML, you can just code the HTML directly. Or, you can go onto Elance.com and pay someone to make you a website template or even an entire website. Another option is to use a blog program like WordPress, which is free and very easy to set up. Since WordPress has so many plugins and so many templates (themes) available, this is a particularly good solution for people who want to get up and running pretty quickly. What do I personally do when I need to build a new website? It depends. If it is a website that I plan to spend a ton of effort on (like the Neurolinker website), I will use a professional graphics designer on Elance to design the site for me. If it is just one of many small websites I plan to put together on a niche topic, I will usually either use WordPress or use a free template I found online. Join Advertising Networks and Place Ads On Your Website In order to make money, each of your websites will have some sort of advertisements on them. Popular advertising programs fall into two main categories: Pay Per Click Ads. These ads pay you every time someone clicks on the ad on your website. These include the popular Google Adsense ads, but also ads from Chitika, Bidvertiser, and several other ad networks. Affiliate Ads. These ads pay you only when someone actually purchases something from the advertiser after viewing your ad. These include ads from places like Clickbank, Commission Junction, Azoogle, and many other popular affiliate networks. Adsense and PPC Ads One popular type of advertisement is the PPC ad, the most often used example of which is Adsense ads from Google. These are the little text ads that you often see on websites with text at the bottom that says "Ads by Google". Here is how Adsense works: First you must have one or more of your own websites and/or blogs. To make money from Adsense, you simply place a small amount of code (which you get from your Adsense account website) into a prominent place on each of your websites. When anyone views your website, this code will generate some advertisements from advertisers who have products or services that are closely related to the topic of your website. That's the beauty of Adsense - the code is smart enough to figure out what your webpage is about (i.e., the general topic of your website)and is also smart enough to pull in advertisements that are related to that topic. This means that people who view your webpage are likely to be interested in the advertisements the Adsense code shows to them. Since your webpage visitors are likely to be interested in your ads, some of them will click on an ad that interests them. Every time a vistor clicks on an Adsense ad, Google charges the advertiser some amount of money, anywhere from pennies up to a few dollars for very competitive products or services. Google will then share some of this click revenue with you for owning the website. At the end of every month, Google simply sends you a check for the Adsense revenue your site or sites have earned. (You must have a minimum balance of $100 owed to you before Google will send you a check). Getting started in the Adsense business is really easy. Once you have one or more websites, you will need to apply for the Adsense Program. Click here to apply for this program. Applying is completely free and only requires you to fill out a few forms with your contact and website information. Most people are accepted into the program and are notified via email within a couple of days. Once you have an account with Adsense, you simply login to your Adsense account and click on the Adsense Setup tab to get started in creating your ads. Follow the directions for putting Adsense code onto your websites and you're off annd running. There really is no simpler way to make money online than by hosting Adsense ads. On the other hand, the amount of money you can make is typically not that large unless you have lots of traffic to your website, or lots of websites, or (usually) both. Want specifics? Ok. In my experience, a typical website with a 5-10 pages of unique content but very little web promotion will typically earn only 5 cents to 20 cents in Adsense clicks per day. If you get a bunch of backlinks (say, using Neurolinker) and do some article marketing (now also available in Neurolinker) and do some additional website promotion, it is certainly possible for your website to earn a dollar per day or even more in Adsense. Of course, if you put lots and lots of time into your one website within a really unique niche, it is certainly possible to earn quite abit more than that. The click through rate (CTR) measures what percentage of your visitors actually click on an ad. A typical click through rate can be anywhere from 0.1% to 5%. You can expect your Adsense income to be roughly proportional to your number of visitors, so if you have lots and lots of vistors to your website or websites, then you can expect to enjoy a reasonable income from Adsense. On the other hand, Google has a tendency to change the rules on people whenever they want and can even drop people from the Adsense program for whatever reason they feel like. As a result, most successful website businesses do not rely solely on Adsense for their income. Programs that are similar to Adsense in many ways include Chitika and Bidvertiser. These can be used either in addition to Adsense or even instead of Adsense in case Google drops you from their Adsense program. Affiliate Program Ads Affiliate Programs are a terrific way to earn money from home without having to sell your own products or services. Basically, and affiliate program is a revenue sharing program offered by many merchants where they will share some fraction of the sales earnings that they get from customers that you bring to them. So for example, suppose you have a website on coin collecting, and on that website you have an advertisement for a particular coin collecting information e-book. The advertisement has a link to the company that is selling that e-book for $29.95. If a website visitor clicks on that advertisement to go to the e-book website, and then purchases that e-book, then the company that owns the e-book site will pay you some fraction of the $29.95. In many cases, especially for information products, the affiliate commission can be 50% or more, so in our e-book example you would earn almost $15 from every sale, even though you are advertising a product that isn't even yours! That's the beauty of affiliate programs - you make money by advertsing "other people's stuff." One great thing about affiliate programs is that you can use these in conjunction with the Adsense program. It is perfectly fine, in fact desirable, to have both Adsense and affiliate program ads on your site. That way you have multiple sources of income - Adsense income if people click on those ads and affiliate income if people buy products from affiliate sites you direct them to with your affiliate ads. Most affiliate programs have a variety of graphical ads (banner ads, skyscraper ads, box ads, etc.) for you to use absolutely free. To use these ads, you simply past a bit of HTML code from the affiliate program website into your webpages. The most important thing about your affiliate ad is the affiliate link, which is a special URL that the affiliate program has create just for you with your own unique user ID that identifies you and your website as the person/website that sent the customer to the advertiser's website. That is how an advertiser knows where the customer came from and to whom any affiliate commissions are owed. As an example of an affiliate program that has been successful for me, take a look at my cellphone ringtone website. I joined an affiliate program offered by a company called Funtonia. I personally created the KewlCell.com website to help promote the ringtones offered by Funtonia. Because the Funtonia ringtone service is such a great, low cost way of getting unlimited ringtones onto your cellphone, I have been very successful in driving traffic to the Funtonia site and getting affiliate commissions from sales there. Unfortunately there is no single way to identify the very best and most lucrative affiliate programs to join. Think about it - if there were such a lsit then every home business opportunity seeker would join the affiliate program and create huge competition to sell products! The best way to find good affiliate programs is to search the web for affiliate programs and find those programs for fairly new products and products for which there doesn't seem to be much competition. The better the product and the lower the competition, the more likely you will be to profit from selling this product as an affiliate. There are also some well known affiliate or Cost Per Action (CPA) networks that you can join. These networks give you access to affiliate links for a wide range of products and services. The downside to this is that these networks are pretty well known so you will generally have lots of competition in selling these products. But if you can put together one or more quality websites with your own quality content that drives enough traffic to the site, then you can still earn a good income from this approach. The networks I suggest are as follows: Clickbank Commission Junction Azoogle Ads Maxbounty CPA Empire These are the ones I have used, but you can find many more of these just by searching the web for "cpa networks". Domain Names and Web Hosting You will need to get a domain name for your website, and you will need to get web hosting so that your website can be seen by the world at large. Purchase a domain name (such as my-cool-site.com) from a good domain name registrar like NameCheap.com. Total cost is about $9 per year. Next, purchase a web hosting account from a good web host. The total cost for web hosting is about $5 to $15 per month. A good option for hosting is to get Hostgator web hosting. Hostgator is a hosting service that has been in business for many years and provides you with terrific hosting plans, especially if you are considering making a large number of websites. For under $8 per month, you can get a plan that allows you to host an unlimited number of domains. It comes with CPanel for file and account management and lots of other great features. Hostgator should be your first choice for hosting your websites, especially if you are making a large number of Adsense and affiliate websites. Getting Backlinks and Driving Traffic Once your website is up and running, you will need to drive traffic to it. If you want free traffic, you will need to get as many backlinks as you can from related websites. And yes, I do indeed have a recommended solution for you to solve this problem: Neurolinker! The Neurolinker system gives you lots of backlinks from related websites to help push your website up the search engine rankings and help more people find your website. Neurolinker now even lets you write and submit articles so that you can get backlinks within the context of articles on someone else's website. These are exactly the sort of backlinks that the search engines like to see. So Neurolinker should be your number one choice for getting backlinks. But there's also a brand new traffic generation system that is completely complementary to Neurolinker and lets you drive a ton of traffic to your website. You should definitely take a good look at the terrific Traffic Drill system. This system works by letting other webmasters like you help you to get backlinks from places like StumbleUpon, Digg, and other social bookmarking websites. This system is one big "you scratch my back and I'll scratch yours" website where everyone helps out everyone else. It is especially powerful when used in conjunction with Neurolinker, because the two systems give you backlinks from different types of websites (regular Adsense/affiliate/product webites for Neurolinker, social bookmarking websites for TrafficDrill). Links from both types of websites are important and useful and will bring you a big increase in traffic.